Chiming in after a couple of months, the 996 is fascinating. It reminds me of academia (in America). In academia, at least in scientific fields, including social sciences for this purpose only, 60 hours a week is normal. Anyone passionate about their work, their research, is working at least that much for most of their career. 50 hours is probably the minimum, and 70 hours might be common for some labs. The 996 is more, since it's 72 hours. More than 60 seems to be the cut-off for some academic researchers I know – beyond that they can't have a normal life that involves any other activity (I know several who teach at ballet studios or group exercise classes at gyms). There's also the issue of family.
I'm sure that 996 will not work for Americans in a corporate context. The mentality and context of academic scientists is very different. They're autonomous and self-guided. They own themselves and their work. They're not doing it for anyone else, certainly not a corporation. Americans won't be willing to work 72 hours a week as the default for their careers. Maybe for a year at an early startup that they have a big financial stake in with options or whatever, but not permanently, at a big fab that brings no such financial windfall. Americans aren't that loyal to or trusting of large employers anymore. They might never have been – 72 hours a week is pretty much insane. It means no real life outside of work, except maybe church on Sundays. That kind of work setup also requires a spouse who is not doing 996, else no one would be able to take care of children, or run the myriad errands of a modern family life. It seems like it's designed for Asian men with stay-at-home wives, and that's obviously not portable to the US in 2022. It's a non-starter.
I was thinking of something else recently. I think being in America is going to become a significant liability in the near future, if it hasn't become so already, for political reasons. American companies are letting leftists co-opt their workplaces to such an alarming degree that I think a lot of people will savor the prospect of getting away from the madness. We're clearly seeing a cult at this point, and it's such a weird cult that I'm not sure we could even explain it to executives in Singapore or Japan or pretty much any non-Western country. The indoctrination in crackpot pseudoscience (those slides that Coke was using were amazing: "be less White"), the obsession with race and permanent hyper-neurotic victim narratives, the assertions that their favored invisible forces are the most important factors in our world and decisively shape every outcome (every cult has its thing, its invisible force that explains everything around us), the incredible tension and stress leftists are creating for everyone else, the extremely predictable explosion in violent crime – it's like having Scientologists take over, and a lot of smart people would rather be somewhere else. Not to mention the de facto tax of the awful American legal system, what with the unjust and capricious lawsuits, patent predators, etc. All this BS is completely avoidable by just not being in the US. Even just moving to Mexico is a huge win to get away from the cult, the bogus lawsuits, and the patent predators (née trolls).
Back to the science of node development, it's amazing to me that nature is carved this way. I still don't understand how TSMC has done it. It's the same physics, the same laws. Even now, it's not at all clear that Intel will ever be able to achieve what TSMC already has circa December, 2021. That is, can Intel, or anyone else, actually produce something on par with the improved N5 or the imminent N3 with the same production ability/efficiency? From what I read, Intel's 10nm node has been extremely expensive and inefficient on the production side. Intel can hide costs more than TSMC since it's not selling it to anyone. I think it was also reported that their 10nm was so complex that it was unattractive to potential customers during their first aborted go at a foundry business (LG might have been the prospect). It just seems far short of what TSMC achieved. I don't believe in any of Intel's scheduled nodes, all the renamed stuff. There's something wrong there, and I don't understand what it is. They don't seem to be able to develop nodes in a smooth way that results in something unambiguously better than what came before. It's been so long since Intel offered anything like that. I guess 14nm was the last time, and it was weirdly not that great at first, with Broadwell. Haswell was actually pretty amazing in retrospect. Maybe one of the 14nm x-Lake chips amounts to a decent bump over Haswell, but the 10nm stuff has been treading water.
It's just so strange that TSMC can do it, but not anyone else. I'm grasping for some sort of R&D methodological breakthrough, a breakthrough in the science of delivering breakthroughs, but maybe the answer is more mundane. I'm curious about the nature of the cognitive work involved in node development, compared to other forms of engineering and innovation domains. Is it just chopping wood with thousands of 996 engineers? Can brilliance or genius have a lot of leverage like in software, design, etc.? I even wonder about the tools. TSMC works with Synopsis or Cadence on the end-user tools, but I wonder what tools node development might involve, and whether high performance computing is used to develop new nodes. It still seems like very few fields or teams ever think about HPC and how it might be exploited.